Shots were fired Thursday afternoon, as CCN received a press release from Calvin Ayre’s CoinGeek which contained some interesting words that are sure to heat up the discussion around the chainsplit and intentional hard fork in Bitcoin Cash.

One of the quotes from Calvin Ayre elucidates his feeling that all is not well on the side of the opposition, nor is it upstanding.

“CoinGeek and nChain are in this battle for the long haul. We will mine BCH and fight as long as it takes to protect the original Bitcoin from Bitmain, Jihan Wu, and their Bitcoin ABC development group who all want to change BCH into some alt-coin Wormhole token technology. Roger Ver’s company Bitcoin.com is subsidizing hash for only 24 hours, taken from his own customers. As for Bitmain, to keep up with us in this hash war, Bitmain will have to spend millions of dollars a day from its investors’ money and shareholder assets, while also trying to raise more investor money for its shaky IPO. This will bleed Bitmain’s cash and cryptocurrency reserves, because we are prepared to fight for months and months. If I were a shareholder or investor in Bitmain, I’d be asking why Jihan Wu is spending all your money to control BCH when Bitmain’s business supports multiple cryptocurrencies.”

Actively updated data on the Bitcoin SV blockchain is still hard to come by. One hopes that as part of establishing themselves independently, regardless of philosophical inclinations, they will provide some blockchain and data gathering tools.

Hash War To Be Settled Over “Many Days”

As noted above, Ayre has specifically stated that he and his compatriots are ready to “fight for months and months.” The question arises, though: what is the real fight? Several major companies have already pledged their support to the Bitcoin ABC chain. Another section of the press release reads:

“Therefore, the BCH hash war will not be decided in 1 or 2 days, but over many days and possibly weeks by on-going miner votes with sustained Proof of Work. Until a dominant chain emerges, cryptocurrency exchanges, wallet and service providers are advised to remain neutral, and to run a Bitcoin SV node to be prepared for the best interests of users.”

Questions arise in all this. For instance, what is meant by “dominant chain?” To date, three major exchanges have upgraded to Bitcoin SV alongside Bitcoin ABC – none have done so exclusively – while several have indicated sole support of Bitcoin ABC, including two major transaction processors.

It is a stretch to imagine any of these companies reversing course on these decisions without some massive reason for so doing. They did their research and made a decision. The outcome of the “hash war” will primarily be a 0 or 1 as regards the survival of both chains or just one chain. At present, with any amount of hash power, Bitcoin ABC will survive. Having the backing of Bitmain co-founder Jihan Wu, who is deeply connected in the mining industry, it seems self-evident that ABC will continue to have a requisite hash rate.

Are Bitcoin ABC Backers Wasting Customer Funds?

Ayre does raise an interesting point, that both Bitcoin.com and Bitmain are acting somewhat independently in their decisions to back the ABC fork. All the same, customers and clients are forever welcome to economically vote by taking their business elsewhere. The crypto market recently suffered a large-scale bear attack and it remains unclear where all the monies went.

Yet, so long as the Bitcoin ABC fork is viable and enjoys support of the economic majority (node count is one indicator of this), it is unlikely that a successful argument can be made that either party acted against the financial interest of any shareholders or investors.

The https://t.co/6EeRmpfaH7 pool now has more hash rate on it than the entire BCH network had earlier today. Bitcoin is cash for the world! #BitcoinCash #bitcoincashfork pic.twitter.com/n2MqQ5mlfK

— Roger Ver (@rogerkver) November 15, 2018

Another note in the press release related to the fact that Bitcoin.com’s mining pool spiked the hash rate at fork time.

Source: cash.coin.dance

It remains unclear where all the hash that went into the pool actually came from, as the BCH hash yesterday was much more than the pool’s sum total regularly and/or today.

pool.bitcoin.com hashrate 11/16/18 9:45AM CST

CCN has reached out to Bitcoin.com for comment on the press release and will update this article upon receiving a reply.

On Wednesday, Oct. 10, the mining operation SV Pool mined its first Bitcoin Cash block. The pool operators led by the blockchain firms Nchain and Coingeek say that hundreds of miners from all around the world have signed up to mine with the pool.

Bitcoin SV Pool Makes a Move On the Scaling Chess Board

There’s a little more than a month left until the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network upgrade scheduled for November 15. To this day there is still a disagreement between the Bitcoin ABC developers and the team behind Bitcoin SV, the new full node software created by Nchain that has an entirely different upgrade plan. At approximately 10:12 a.m. EDT on Oct. 10, the mining operation SV Pool mined its first BCH block at height 55185. Coingeek and Nchain claim that hundreds of miners are registering for the pool and 233 miners have pre-registered in September. Public registration for the pool will begin in mid-October and the operation plans to add pay-per-share plus (PPS+) payouts alongside the pool’s current pay-per-last-N-shares (PPLNS) plans.

Over the last few weeks, the BCH community has been talking about ‘hash wars’ and solving things with Nakamoto consensus. Lots of people believe that a ‘hash war’ will be sparked between miners who support Bitcoin ABC with miners who support the SV client. Others think there really isn’t much of a divergence within the community and there likely won’t be a split. On Oct. 9 the Coingeek columnist Erik Gibbs claimed Bitcoin ABC developers don’t believe in Nakamoto consensus. Gibbs also wrote that the recent debate has led to some people saying the November hard fork could result in a split.

“But there is a minority of individuals who are apparently pushing for it to happen,” the Coingeek writer explained. “One of these is Bitcoin ABC — The development team has repeatedly spoken out against several advances that are being added to Bitcoin BCH, including the Nakamoto Consensus.”

The Question Remains: Increase the Limit Now or Optimize Before Raising the Limit?

The Bitcoin ABC development team and volunteers appeared in a video on Oct. 4, answering all kinds of questions concerning some of the roadmap’s upgrades. During one of the questions, the ABC developers were asked why Bitcoin SV programmers disliked canonical transaction ordering (CTOR). The Bitcoin Cash miner and programmer Jonathan Toomim answered the question by claiming that the Bitcoin SV camp is wrong about CTOR.

“Bitcoin SV believes that CTOR is wrong and that we shouldn’t do it — They are wrong about that because CTOR is great and awesome and it will help Bitcoin scale,” Toomim details. “Bitcoin SV has this very interesting idea but interesting in not so good of a way. They want to increase the block size limit while simultaneously getting rid of the features that will help us achieve the block size limit or a higher capacity in a safe fashion.”

Q&A with Bitcoin ABC developers and other contributors.

Hash Wars and Two Hard Fork Rule Sets Colliding

Toomim also adds that he doesn’t have any sympathy for the Bitcoin SV perspective at all. The developer says that CTOR helps improve block propagation and with the Graphene protocol added it could create a huge difference in optimization performance. Further, Bitcoin ABC developer Jason Cox detailed how the failure rate for compact blocks gets more excessive when huge blocks are processed. At the very end of the video, Toomin emphasizes that a ‘hash war’ is the wrong way to find a resolution to this disagreement.

“You can’t use a hash war to resolve this issue — If you have different hard forking rule sets you are going to have a persistent chain split no matter what the hash rate distribution is,” Toomin adds.

Overall the biggest disagreement between both camps is the method by which BCH can achieve scaling massive sized blocks. The Bitcoin SV team wants to upgrade the block size limit to 128 MB this November and continue increasing the limit over time. Bitcoin ABC believes the chain won’t be capable of handling these large block sizes without adding things like CTOR beforehand. The disagreement has led to certain members of the community choosing sides, while some remain neutral and wait to see if a ‘hash war’ will really come to fruition.

Feel like you missed something? For a brief history concerning BCH consensus changes planned for Nov. 15, 2018, check out these reports below:

The Opposition Towards Bitcoin ABC’s Proposed Upgrade Changes

Coingeek Speaks on Consensus Changes and Next-Gen ASIC Chip

Nchain Plans to Launch a BCH Full Node Client Called ‘Bitcoin SV’

November BCH Upgrade Discussion Heats Up After Bitcoin SV Full Node Announcement